My prayers were answered. The mattress was a vast expanse of memory foam that brought to mind snuggling up to Auntie Mana’s cushiony bosom. I considered taking a short nap while Lisa Marie snoozed under her gossip mag, but figured I should first give Hatch and Steve a call to let them know I’d survived the settling in.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“I was just going to call you,” said Steve. “The second you left the phone started ringing. You in a place you can talk?”
“Yep, fire away.”
“Well, first of all, your buddy Septic Tank called. He’s demanding you call him back. He wanted your cell number, but I wouldn’t give it to him. He sounded pretty steamed about something.”
“I couldn’t care less. Now that I got this babysitting gig I’m ripping up his check so whatever he’s bitching about isn’t my problem.”
“From the way he was going off, you still might want to give him a call.
“I’ll think about it, but I was kind of looking forward to telling him to ‘pack sand’ in person.”
“He’s heading back to Honolulu this morning, but he’ll be on his cell later on.”
“Did he leave a number? I don’t exactly have him on speed dial.” I was hoping he’d say ‘no’ and I’d be free to ignore Tank for the rest of the day.
“Hang on, the guy’s got more numbers than a deck of cards.” He rattled off Tank’s cell, pager, answering service, and home.
“Moving on,” he continued, “Doug at your kung fu place called. He said to tell you—and this is right outta his mouth—‘My brother James is the man.’ He said to stop by and he’d explain.”
“Huh. That sounds good.”
“And finally, I don’t want to burn through your cell minutes, but I thought you’d want to know that Mitch—you know, my bartender friend—told me he heard there’s something hinky with the surveillance video from Ma’alaea Harbor. You know, the one with Lisa Marie and Kevin arguing.”
“What’s hinky about it?”
“Not sure.”
“Where’d Mitch hear this?”
“Beats me. But you know what they say—only three people you can trust: your momma, your barber and your bartender.”
I thanked him for the messages and asked him to put Hatch on.
“Sure, just a second.” There was a rattling sound as he put down the phone. When it was picked up again it was still Steve. “Sorry, Pali, but he’s in the john or something. Says he can’t talk now. But before I sign off, I want you to promise me you’ll stay safe down there. Call every day. If I don’t hear from you, I’m marshalling a posse from the Ball and Chain and we’ll come looking. You know, my friends love a party—even a search party.”
“Now there’s an image.” In my mind’s eye I saw the rainbow coalition storming the gate at Olu’olu—all bare chests, coifed do’s and well-oiled pecs.
“Anyhow, you watch your back, sweetie, okay?”
I agreed and signed off. Then I went searching for Josie. I found her vacuuming an immense round rug in the foyer. It was a work of art—a pieced wool tapestry of palms, hibiscus flowers, and red ginger. The roar of the vacuum drowned out the sound of my approach, so I positioned myself in front of her and waved. She shut off the machine and the motor wound down with a whine.
“Sorry for interrupting your work, but I need to leave for a while. Would you mind keeping an eye on Lisa Marie?”
She puckered up her face as if not pleased to be thrust in that role, but after a couple of seconds she gave me a one-shoulder shrug signaling she’d do it.
“Is she still in the sunroom?” I said. “Maybe I should tell her I’m leaving.”
“She taking a shower.”
“Okay. I’ll be back by…” I looked over at the immense grandfather clock. “No later than ten o’clock.”
I zipped up to the Palace of Pain. The back parking area was nearly full, which meant there was a class in session. I quietly opened the back door trying to not interrupt. As I slowly pulled the door shut behind me, the hinge shrieked, and Sifu Doug glanced up and waved. He was leading a tots class for kids who looked about three or four years old. A group of moms sat in a circle of folding chairs in one corner of the room. They were chatting and laughing; each one clutching a coffee mug. It appeared they were enjoying pre-school martial arts a heck of a lot more than their offspring.
The kids wore black uniforms with thick white sashes wound around their waists. Some of them were so skinny their sashes were double-wrapped around their body yet they still hung down past their knees.
“I’ll come back later.” I stage whispered.
“No, no,” said Sifu Doug. “Hang on a minute.” He instructed the students to practice the form they were working on and told them he’d be back in a few minutes to check their progress. A couple of the moms lifted their heads and nodded as if to assure Doug they’d keep an eye out for shenanigans.
At his office door Sifu Doug kept an ice-filled picnic cooler stocked with water bottles. He motioned for me to help myself and I grabbed two waters, offering one to him before taking one for myself. In all things martial arts there’s a protocol—a hierarchy of respect.
He pulled the top off his bottle and took a long pull. Then he made his way into the cluttered space of his tiny office. Pushing aside a tangle of padded headgear, an unopened cardboard box embellished with FedEx stickers, and a broom with a broken handle, he sat down in his creaky desk chair. He pointed to a white plastic chair behind the door.
“Pull that over and have a seat. I told you I’d call if I heard anything more about your killer bride.”
I politely reminded him that everyone’s presumed innocent until proven guilty. The look on his face told me I’d failed to make even a small dent in his opinion.
“Da kine, it don’t matter whether she’s innocent or guilty, ‘cuz James is pretty sure she won’t even get arrested.” He scooted his chair in and lowered his voice. “That video the cops have is messed up. Time code’s all off.”
I bit my lip. This must be what Steve’s bartender meant about the tape being ‘hinky.’
“What’s that mean—time code?” I said.
“The time code on a surveillance tape is a bunch of numbers in the lower corner that shows what time the tape got recorded. On the video it shows a time code of 20:32, that’s eight-thirty at night. But the sun sets before seven and on this tape it’s bright daylight, so something’s messed up. And without that tape, they got nothing linking your girl to either of the guys on the night they died. James says he’s thinks she musta hired a pro to do in the guy.”
I considered correcting him once again about the presumption of innocence but I let it slide. I still hadn’t been successful in getting Farrah to call Lipton a she—and the dog had the goods to prove it—so how could I expect to change anyone’s mind about Lisa Marie’s guilt?
“The cops have only been working the case a few days,” I said. “Something else might come up.”
“Might, but James is real stoked. He says they got nothin’ and they’re not gonna get nothin’.”
We chugged from our water bottles.
I asked if he’d had much fallout from the MRSA scare. He said two students dropped out, but they weren’t hardcore, so he thought they probably just used it as an excuse to get their money back.
A couple of minutes later, I got up to leave. I thanked Doug for calling me about the tape and gave him a short bow.
As I walked out to my car, I felt something shift. Finding out who killed Brad and Kevin was no longer just about collecting some reward money or even making good on my pact with Kevin. I flashed back to my air marshal days—when I imagined myself grabbing a couple of scumbag terrorists by the hair and pitching them out of a plane at thirty-five thousand feet. In my world it’s crucial the good guys win. No, to be truthful, it’s more arrogant than that: in my world I need to make sure the bad guys lose.
CHAPTER 30
I got into my car lost in though
t about the faulty surveillance video. The information had been passed down two or three times, so I wasn’t ready to take it as fact. And even if the video was thrown out, maybe Lisa Marie’s lawyer was being premature in his smug belief that the cops had no additional evidence against his client. Maybe they had eye witnesses and fingerprints and a pile of other stuff they were planning to throw at her in court. Then it dawned on me. They didn’t. If they did, she’d already be cooling her Jimmy Choos in the Wailuku jail.
Even Daddy Prescott’s considerable means would be of little use to her if she was arrested and charged with premeditated murder. Forget bail. She was a flight risk—literally—and wealthy enough to shrug off walking away from even the most outrageous bail bond. With no ties to the community, and a lifestyle that wouldn’t vary whether she lived in St. Tropez or St. Louis, the judge would realize chances were slim to none she’d bother returning to Maui for trial.
So now what? With no evidence against Lisa Marie, and the cops unwilling to consider other motives, the official investigation would soon sputter to a halt. A sad scenario played out in my mind: Wong placing the puny amount of evidence they had—Kevin’s autopsy report, the inadmissible videotape, and a few pages of interview notes—into a white cardboard box labeled ‘cold case.’ In time, the box would get shipped off to Honolulu where it would join hundreds of other forgotten white boxes in a dimly-lit warehouse off Beretania Street. Todd Barker’s snide opinion of Hawaii’s police work and judicial system was beginning to look regrettably accurate. Two deaths in two weeks. Both questionable, both unsolved.
To be fair, unlike the other forty-nine states, the seven major inhabited islands of Hawaii present unique challenges for law enforcement. To start with, we’re completely surrounded by water—three thousand miles of ocean in all directions. If a body is recovered from the ocean, normal forensic work is nearly impossible. Salt water erases the killer’s fingerprints, washes away blood spatter and DNA, and even messes with toxicology reports. Tox reports generally are deemed “inconclusive” if the victim gulped copious amounts of seawater before dying.
What’s more, if a killer dumps a victim’s body into the ocean, chances are high it will never be recovered. The ocean has its own ‘circle of life.’ A hunk of dead flesh—human or otherwise—is like a Publisher’s Clearinghouse Prize for sea creatures up and down the food chain.
I started my car and drove slowly down the alley. As I waited to make the turn onto the Hana Highway I had to yield to a yellow Maui County Fire engine as it screamed past me and took a left on Baldwin. I pulled out and stayed back a few car lengths—I remember something on the driver’s license exam about giving emergency vehicles at least fifteen feet, or was it fifty?
It didn’t take fifty feet for me to figure out where they were headed. Smoke billowed from under the eaves of the Gadda-da-Vida and from a big hole in the roof over my shop. The police had blocked off Baldwin at Akoni Place so I pulled over and jumped out to follow on foot.
I was in an flat-out sprint when a firefighter in full gear—SCBA tank on his back and plastic face shield down—extended a gloved hand to halt my progress.
“Day bat,” he said behind the mask.
I squinted in confusion.
“Stay back,” he said, exaggerating the words so I could read his lips.
“That’s my shop.” I pointed to the roiling smoke.
“Sorry.” He took my elbow and steered me toward a cordoned off area where a knot of bystanders had gathered.
“No, you don’t understand—”
With his big gloved hand he gave my shoulder a slight push toward the yellow tape. I moved toward the onlookers, all the while watching the oily black smoke engulfing the building. As I bent to duck under the ‘caution’ tape, I heard the click whir, click whir of a film camera with an automatic advance.
“Hey,” it was Steve. He was crouched on the ground, a few feet behind the tape. “You okay?” Click whir, click whir.
“Have you seen Farrah?” I peered at the front window of my shop. The glass was intact, but it looked as if it’d been painted black.
“No, but Beatrice is out here somewhere. She’s the one who called 9-1-1. You run into Hatch yet?”
“He’s here?”
“Yeah. We caught the call on his scanner. Got here about the same time the first engine pulled up.” Click whir, click whir.
I scanned the crowd. No sign of Hatch or Farrah.
Steve lowered his camera. “You might try sneaking around back. Last I saw he was talking to a guy headed that way.”
The access to the alley was blocked by fire apparatus, but I glimpsed a three foot opening between the fire engine and the alley fence. There was a guy working the pump panel on the near side of the truck, but the rest of the firefighters had congregated along the hose line laid out in front of my shop. The front door had been forced open and the nozzle man was poised to enter. A guy in a white helmet yelled into his walkie-talkie and the hose team marched through the door, lugging a fat snake of khaki hose inside.
After four or five minutes the crowd control guy turned his back and I took the opportunity to slip away. I wedged myself in the space between the fire engine and the sagging chain link fence and crab-walked alongside the vibrating truck until I was behind the building. I checked up and down the alleyway for a guy on a crutch. Or a mu’u mu’u clad woman with a wide halo of frizz. Nothing.
I looked up. Farrah’s apartment door stood open. No firefighters in sight. I bounded up the stairway, smelling the bitter stench of burning wood and calculating how many bones I’d break when the stairs gave way.
The smoky haze inside the living room made it look like a black and white photograph. My eyes stung and quickly filled with tears; my nose refused to suck in even a shallow breath of the acrid air. An aluminum crutch was propped on one end of the sofa.
“Hatch? Farrah?” I don’t think I actually said it out loud; it was probably just my brain screaming.
Hatch was on hands and one knee behind the coffee table on the living room floor. His broken leg with the stiff white cast was stretched out behind him. As I made my way over to him, he reached out his hand and swept under the table as if trying to locate something.
I bent down so he could see me. By now my lungs were beginning to feel starved for air, but I grabbed the back of his shirt and nodded toward the bedroom. I probably should have stuck around to help him get up, but I didn’t. I figured he wouldn’t leave until he’d found what he’d come up there for, and I felt the same.
I scanned the bedroom and looked under the bed. One good thing about a tiny apartment—it doesn’t take long to search.
The box was in the bedroom closet, right where it’d been when I’d first seen the pups. Lipton had positioned herself over her puppies, so I couldn’t do a headcount. Her eyes looked defiant, but she didn’t make a sound as I grabbed the box and roughly jostled it into carrying position.
Hatch and I got to the door at the same time. He gave me a little ‘after you’ wag of his crutch and I dashed down the stairs, trying my best to avoid dumping mother and brood onto the pavement below. Hatch thumped hard at my heels.
“Hey! What the hell are you two doing?” It was the white helmet guy yelling from the end of the alley. He sprinted toward us.
If I’d had any air in my lungs, I might have answered. Instead, I sucked in huge gulps of oxygen and just held up my hand in a give me a minute gesture. I tried to talk but only managed to cough up sticky phlegm.
Meanwhile, Hatch busied himself taking stock of the pups. He pulled them out one-by-one and checked their eyes and then ran a finger inside their mouths. Lipton was still in the box. When he got around to lifting her out, she drooped like a half-filled sack of rice. Her eyes were glassy, her mouth slack.
Hatch laid her gently on the pavement and bent over her. He gripped her head and put her nose and mouth into his mouth, and blew in three quick breaths. Her torso expanded. He released his mouth and pressed his
palm against her chest, one-two-three.
Hatch kept up the doggie CPR, even though it appeared futile to me. Lipton’s chest rose and fell with Hatch’s breaths, but other than that I saw no change. By then, three firefighters had entered the alley through the back door of my shop. They’d flipped their face shields up and I saw them shoot each other amused glances, but they said nothing.
Steve showed up just as Lipton’s legs began to twitch. Click whir, click whir. Lipton lifted her head and bicycled her legs as she tried to stand.
A firefighter came forward and clapped Hatch on the shoulder. “Good job, man.” The guy had caught him on his bad side, but Hatch didn’t flinch.
“No sense letting things die,” Hatch said. It looked like he might have had tears in his eyes, but smoke does that.
Farrah arrived at the entrance to the alley only minutes after Lipton’s return from the Great Beyond. I ran to her.
“What happened?” she said. “I went out to look at rentals and the next thing I knew there were sirens everywhere.”
I hugged her and we both took in the scene. The back doors to both her store and my shop stood open. Dark gray water trickled over the threshold of my shop, but the store was dry—just a veil of smoke wafted outside.
Before I could say anything the white helmet guy came forward. “You the occupant of these premises?”
“That’s my shop,” I managed to rasp.
“Yeah, and that’s my store. And my home.” Farrah pointed to the stairway.
“Well, turns out we didn’t need to send any crews over there. Got it knocked down before it could spread.” He turned to me. “Any idea how this got started?”
I didn’t say anything. Wasn’t figuring that out his job?
As if he read my mind, he went on, “So far, we’re not ruling out arson. First-in team noticed a slight accelerant smell and what appeared to be an intentional fuel load in the back—a pile of lumber. But it doesn’t take much; one spark and these old buildings go up like kindling. I’m calling in the fire investigator.”
Maui Widow Waltz (Islands of Aloha Mystery Series) Page 22